Page:The Works of the Rev. Jonathan Swift, Volume 12.djvu/242

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MY LORD,

UNDERSTAND, by some letters just come to my hands, that at your grace's visitation of the dean and chapter of St. Patrick's, a proxy was insisted on from the dean, the visitation adjourned, and a rule entered that a proxy be exhibited within a month. If your grace can find, in any of your old records or of ours, that a proxy was ever demanded for a dean of St. Patrick's, you will have some reason to insist upon it: but, as it is a thing wholly new and unheard of, let the consequences be what they will, I shall never comply with it. I take my chapter to be my proxy, if I want any: it is only through them that you visit me, and my subdean is to answer for me. I am neither civilian nor canonist: your grace may probably be both, with the addition of a dexterous deputy. My proceeding shall be only upon one maxim: never to yield to an oppression, to justify which no precedent can be produced. I see very well how personal all this proceeding is; and how, from the very moment of the queen's death, your grace has thought fit to take every opportunity of giving me all sorts of uneasiness, without ever giving me, in my whole life, one single mark of your favour beyond common civilities. And if it were not below a man of spirit to make complaints, I could date them from six and twenty years past. This has something in it the more  traordinary,